The beetles had reached her neck. She felt their sharp pincers and feelers searching inside the collar of her shirt, pushing under her hair. She slapped them away, crushed them, got her hands slick with their ichor. Ahead of her, there was a bend in the cave, and when she rounded it, the light was full in her face. There was a jagged cleft, about three feet high, only a foot wide, obscured by roots and grass, but after the jaws of the mountain, it felt as wide as a Walmart aisle.
The ceiling rippled, set off by her frantic movement, and bats dropped, forming a crazy cloud around her. Kris blundered forward, her toenails bending backward on the rocks. Then she leapt for the slash of light, forcing herself out through the crack, hauling herself out into the long grass, desperate to get outside before the cloud of biting, shrieking bats overwhelmed her. She thought she would go insane if they touched her face again.
A root grabbed her waist, kept her suspended in air, then ripped free and Kris slid down the wet hill on her stomach. Her tumble slowed, then stopped, and she lay on her back, panting. The mountain rose up above her. Kris had never been more grateful to be in the open air. Her feet were bleeding, she was covered in bat shit, but she was alive, gulping cold, fresh, sweet oxygen.
Below her, a truck went blasting past in the gray early morning light, headed up the highway. She was on the shoulder of a two-lane blacktop, a scenic overlook on the other side of the road, a huge hill of long grass rising up behind her.
And now what?
She had to keep moving. She had to get away. If they found her and brought her back to the Well, her mind wouldn’t survive. Kris slid down the rest of the hill, and after looking both ways, she hobbled across the two lanes to the scenic turnoff. She limped into a clump of bushes, pushed her way out, and kept heading downhill.
Just like that, America reached up and swallowed her whole.
JACK BLAST: For those of you just joining us this is Jack Blast Freedom Radio broadcasting live from the Compound in the great state of Arizona where the men have guns, the women have racks, and every day is hunting season. You’re on the air.
CALLER: This is JD.
JACK BLAST: Our old friend. How goes it, compadre?
CALLER: Forces are on the move, Jack. Past sins will be paid for in blood. You hearing this big increase in chatter? They’re laying the groundwork to cover their asses. This is the big one.
JACK BLAST: And what’s the “big one,” JD? Caller? Are you still on the line? [dead air] Okay, I’m sure that caller will return just as soon as he gets back on his meds.
—WJET, “Radio Free America”
August 13, 2019
n stiff legs, Kris stumbled downhill, trying to put as much distance between herself and Well in the Woods as possible.
Behind a band of dying trees, she found a little house with no cars in the driveway. She drank from their garden hose until her stomach sloshed, and washed away the worst of the bat shit. There wasn’t an inch of her skin that wasn’t bruised, cut, scraped, or torn. Her head felt so light it almost floated off her shoulders, but she forced herself down the road in her soggy white linens, squatting behind parked cars or trudging into the woods whenever a truck came along.
At a beat-down shopping center she found a Salvation Army. Two old guys were unloading boxes of children’s toys into the back.
“You got any clothes?” Kris asked, her throat rusty.
“Sure,” one of the men said. “Inside. For sale.”
Kris held her arms out. The white linen outfit she wore was so wet and stained it was transparent. She only had the one shoe.
“Please,” she said.
One guy went inside. Kris stood on the asphalt, enjoying the heat from the rising sun. The guy came out and threw a black bundle at her.
“Here,” he said, turning his back. “Couldn’t sell those anyway.”
Behind a dumpster, Kris put on pink sweatpants with a big brown stain down one leg. She hoped it was chocolate. There were a pair of Tevas and a black hoodie featuring a full color, ultrarealistic picture of spilling guts on the front. On the back it read “Slipknot World Domination Tour.”
“Wonderful,” Kris said.
She turned it inside out. It would be hell to get out West in these clothes, but they were better than nothing. Troglodyte‘s next track was “Sailing the Seas of Blood,” which told her she needed to keep moving. She had to get out West and stop Terry’s Farewell to the King concerts. Whatever he had planned, she knew it wasn’t good. She was a believer now, both in the pure evil of Terry and the predictive powers of Troglodyte. Kris came back around the dumpster.
“What day is today?” she asked one of the men.
She hoped it was still May. Even if it was Memorial Day weekend, that gave her some time. She needed at least a week to get to LA.
“August twelfth,” the guy said.
Kris’s brain shut off and she walked away blindly. She remembered the sun being in a different position when she ate half a hotdog out a garbage can in a 7-Eleven parking lot. It was directly overhead when she found some congealed fries sitting on the sidewalk outside a Hardees. She ate them. She didn’t know what time it was. It didn’t matter. She’d missed the concerts. She’d failed.
She kept stumbling away from Well in the Woods, hiding from traffic, forcing herself to keep moving. As it got dark, her legs got heavier, and she started to nod off on her feet. Across the street was a huge, green, tree-studded cemetery, and she figured it made sense to sleep there. Terry had gotten his way again. She might as well be dead.
The cemetery was neat as an architect’s model: all straight edges, swept sidewalks, orderly rows of identical headstones. Kris collapsed in the bushes behind a stone gazebo on the side furthest from the road. She woke up at 2 a.m., freezing cold, shivering inside her sweats, wondering what to do next.
She couldn’t go home. Little Charles would send her back to Well in the Woods and by now her house already had new people living in it. Tuck had betrayed her. Scottie was dead. Terry had won. Whatever he was doing was finished. There was no place left for her anymore.
Kris spent the rest of the night awake, desperate for dawn to come, hands buried between her thighs to keep them warm. Every time she started to fall asleep, she heard the snap-pop in Scottie’s basement, saw the tears sheeting down his face, saw Angela on the floor staring up at the ceiling, saw Bill questioning her at Well in the Woods, saw the cold white face hissing at her in Gray’s room. How did she ever think she could fight Black Iron Mountain? They weren’t even human. She was just a musician. Now she wasn’t even that. Twenty years ago, Black Iron Mountain had come for Dürt Würk and their touch had poisoned the rest of her life. All she could do now was hide, and hope they forgot about her.
When the sky finally lightened, Kris walked toward the road, her knees so stiff they felt broken. As she passed the small chapel, she saw a woman sitting with her back against the wall, partially hidden by a shrub.
“Morning,” Kris said, taking her hands out of her armpits to let the woman know she wasn’t a threat.
There were shopping bags stacked on either side of the woman. Her eyes were open, so Kris knew she was awake. She didn’t want to get too close, so she tried again.
“You okay?” Kris asked, and as she said it, she knew the woman was dead.
Kris squatted about five feet from the body. The woman was a hard-living forty, or maybe a young-looking sixty, and her chin rested on her chest. She wore a green windbreaker with a Boca Raton Golf Club emblem over the breast and a stonewashed denim miniskirt. She stared down at something between her feet. Dew collected on her face.
Kris went through the dead woman’s bags. In the bottom of one she found a $10 bill inside an empty pack of cigarettes and an Oklahoma driver’s license identifying her as Deidre McDeere. Kris stole her sneakers. Feeling queasy wasn’t an option anymore.
The sneakers cushioned her feet as she walked through the cemetery gate and down the road. The morning traffic thickened. Her stomach growled with every step. A young black woman with short braids shared half of a doughnut with Kris outside a BP gas station. The glazed sugar made Kris’s mouth erupt in a waterfall of drool. “I’m trying to lose some pounds,” the girl said. “You’re doing me a favor.”
Kris begged for rides at Sunoco gas stations and Wendy’s parking lots. She fell asleep under an overpass across from a silent old man with a dozen pairs of dirty socks pulled over his swollen, seeping feet. When she woke up, a gentle rain was falling, the old man was gone, and there was a can of green beans placed by her side. He’d forgotten to leave her a can opener. She walked down the litter-choked shoulders of highways as cars blasted past and picked her way through the long grass at the exits.
She bought $10 of gas for some Guatemalan guys in exchange for a ride to Louisville. They were headed there to do yards, and only one of them spoke English. Kris sat in the back with him and his teenaged cousins as they smoked cigarettes and played on their phones. When she left, they gave her three striped beach towels she could use as blankets.
In Louisville, she found an access ladder on the back of a Shell station and slept on the roof, staring up at the stars. She woke up with Troglodyte playing in her brain, mocking her.
“Stop it,” she moaned, wrapped in her beach towels, clutching the sides of her skull. “They took three months of my life. Isn’t that enough?”
Terry and Black Iron Mountain had won, she had lost. She wasn’t going to fight anymore. Terry had finished his five concerts and whatever he was doing was already done, and the world still looked like the same shitty place it always was, full of empty storefronts and full emergency rooms. Street corners held down by fast food restaurants and pawn shops and check-cashing joints, and strip-mall churches preaching prosperity, and little girls clutching dollar-store dolls, and little boys with WIC grape juice staining their tongues.
The billboards and bus stop ads said Dollarwise and Cash Advance, Loan Star, Fastcash, Money Mart, and People Pawn. The margins Kris slipped through were full of people who spent their lives standing in lines and shuffling forward, sitting in hot rooms, waiting to hear their names called by someone holding their file. This was where she belonged. Terry had been one step ahead of her for her entire life.
Security cameras hung from every building. Dome cameras squatted over every door, bullet cameras roosted on building corners, PTZ cameras scanned parking lots with their unblinking plastic eyes. HD cameras, hardened for outdoor use, clung to long metal poles protruding above cell phone arrays, beaming back street images on the cellular network. Kris drifted between them, trying to stay out of sight.
In downtown Louisville a bald evangelist, his beard dyed black, gave out bus tickets to the homeless he said the city was murdering. Each one came with a flier about his ministry being shut down and his shelter being busted. Kris listened to his sermon and took the ticket to St. Louis.
On the way, head leaning against the greasy window, she saw a billboard flashing past, almost too fast to process:
HELLSTOCK ’19
KOFFIN RETURNS!
SEPT 6, 7, 8
RIP LAS VEGAS
She turned to the one-legged guy in the seat behind her.
“Did you see that?” she asked.
“That Satanist is doing another Woodstock,” One-Leg said. “I was at the original Woodstock, and it wasn’t in Las Vegas, that’s for sure.”
For the rest of the trip he kept tapping Kris on the shoulder to tell her about how much pussy he scored at the original Woodstock. St. Louis couldn’t come fast enough.
Kris limped through downtown, getting to-go food bags at a masjid soup kitchen and eating at a nearby park. She slept, wrapped inside her towels, buried deep down in the bushes, trying to disappear. But the Las Vegas dates were a sharp tack in the soft folds of her brain.
“What do you want me to do?” she muttered to herself, limping through downtown St. Louis.
At night, she fell asleep apologizing to Scottie, telling him she was sorry. She couldn’t carry the fire. She was just a girl with a guitar, and she didn’t even have the guitar anymore. The best thing she could do was disappear. Make sure Terry never found her. Live quietly inside Black Iron Mountain.
The weekend before Labor Day, she wound up outside the big baseball stadium during a Cardinals game. There was a strip of beer halls and outdoor tables across from the stadium where buskers plucked their guitars under a backbeat of coins rattling into paper cups. She eased herself down to sit on the sidewalk, listening to a girl across the street play a battered acoustic guitar. The girl was trying to play “Brown Eyed Girl.” She had scabs all over her face, and a long-suffering pit bull puppy tied to a thick piece of rope. After the girl butchered “Hey Jude,” Kris couldn’t take it anymore and walked over.
“You’re out of tune,” she said.
The girl ignored her and started playing “Jane Says.” Kris squatted and waited for her to finish.
“You’re scaring people away,” the girl said, not looking at Kris.
“Let me tune it,” Kris said. “Please.”
The girl looked at her with eyes that were a spooky washed-out blue.
“Play E,” Kris said.
The girl plucked E and Kris tightened the lug. Immediately, it sounded like an actual guitar. The girl ran through all the strings as Kris brought them roughly into tune.
Uninvited, she sat on the side of the girl away from the pit bull while she played “The Wind Cries Mary.” The girl still sucked, but at least now she sucked in tune.
“Want me to show you a trick?” Kris asked. “It’ll help you make more money.”
The largest bill in the girl’s ragged Starbucks cup was a quarter.
“Bring your pick down, you’re dragging it. Look,” Kris said, and reached over and guided her hand. The girl stopped missing her E string and sounded better on her sluggish version of “Wish You Were Here.” The pit bull got up, moved over to Kris and lay down again, resting his muzzle on her knee. Kris rubbed him between the eyes and he closed them in sleepy bliss.
“Can I play something?” Kris asked after the girl trailed off uncertainly. “I’m Deidre.”
The girl didn’t answer.
“Just one song?” Kris asked.
The girl handed Kris her guitar and pulled the pit bull onto her lap. Kris balanced the guitar on her right thigh and started to play, just running through scales and chords, warming up her knuckles, making her joints flex. She didn’t think about her fingers as they rippled up and down the fretboard. Finally her strumming started to coalesce into music, and what came out of that cheap, chipped piece-of-shit guitar was the blues.
That didn’t surprise Kris. Relax any metal song enough and you went right back to the blues. Led Zeppelin covered Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks.” Black Sabbath blew a harp on their first album. Hell, the first band Ozzy and Tony Iommi were in together was called the Polka Tulk Blues Band. Hard rock, heavy metal, stoner rock, doom metal—it all dragged itself up out of the swamp called the blues. Kris started to strum “Red Cross Store” by Mississippi Fred McDowell. Tuck had taught her that one, but that was okay right now. It wasn’t Tuck’s music, he was just passing it along, from hand to hand, the songs reaching up through time, ready when you needed them.
It took Kris a few bars to get it tight, and then she was loud and confident, its single-chord vamping primal and hypnotic, the tone from the battered crapbox clear as a glass bell ringing down the street. She rolled into “This Land Is Your Land” and change started to rattle into the cup. It felt good to play, and when she slid into an acoustic version of Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” the girl surprised her by picking up the verse and singing in a slightly cracked voice that stayed roughly on pitch and at leas
t held the rhythm. That was their pattern. The girl sang, Kris played, and they ran through Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, Lead Belly, Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, even the Scorpions.
Every song was the same song. These were songs for people who were scared to open their mailboxes, whose phone calls never brought good news. These were songs for people standing at the crossroads waiting for the bus. People who bounced between debt collectors and dollar stores, collection agencies and housing offices, family court and emergency rooms, waiting for a check that never came, waiting for a court date, waiting for a call back, waiting for a break, crushed beneath the wheel.
Kris’s hands could barely keep up with the music, but she rode it forward and it carried her, and all the songs were in the language of the cardboard signs she saw everywhere she went. Please Help. Need Help. Help me. Trying to get home. Lost everything. Signs written in want, need, must, hungry, sick, lonely, scared. Songs for people who couldn’t escape the weight that pressed down on their backs like a mountain, crushed them to the ground, who couldn’t walk because they were too tired, who couldn’t run away because their feet were in chains, who couldn’t think of a solution because they were too hungry to think past their next meal.
Everyone plays for someone, and Kris didn’t play for the big dogs like Sabbath and Zep, she didn’t play for the ones who made it, for the wizards who figured out how to turn their music into cars and cash and mansions and an endless party where no one ever gets old. She played for the losers. She played for the bands who never met their rainmaker, the musicians who drank too much and made all the wrong decisions. The singers who got shipped off to state hospitals because they couldn’t handle living in the shadow of Black Iron Mountain. She played for the ones who recorded the wrong songs at the right times, and the right songs when it was wrong. The ones who blew it all recording an album that didn’t fit the market, the ones who got dropped by their own labels, the singers who moved back home to live in their mom’s basements.
We Sold Our Souls Page 14